I'm Taking A Midseason Victory Lap For Being The ONLY Fantasy Analyst To Advise Taking A Top QB As Early As Round 2 In Drafts
Before joining Barstool as a part timer I wrote on fantasy football for Fantasy Points among other outlets after going hard into developing what I believe is the best fantasy football stat on the market - wins above replacement. Am I biased because I created it? Of course! But that doesn't mean I'm wrong!
The details are WAY to convoluted to explain here but you can check out the nitty gritties in the link above if you want as I did my best to explain WAR for a general audience. But for purposes of this blog, I'll just mention the main idea with WAR is that it recognizes that you can't compare points to determine what player is better than another at different positions. Duh, right? A QB scoring 20 points is pretty average vs a TE. Instead, WAR compares how many expected wins you are likely to get as a fantasy team by starting a single player over and above what is considered a replacement player. Class over. Have any questions? Click the link above.
Advertisement
That brings us to my take on QB. For years analysts have been telling us that you should wait to draft a QB until the middle rounds or later. And you know what? For years these analysts were spot on. It was impossible to figure out who next year's best QB would be. But those days are no more. Let's check out who the top-three QBs were in 2022 and how well they did overall by WAR:
Any of these also Round 1 worthy QBs in the red bars look familiar?
What about 2021?
The worst performing "Big-3" QB end of season rank from the past two seasons was still worth a Round 2 pick (2021 Jalen Hurts) and all three are on course to earn Round 1 level production in 2023. This is no longer a fluke. Drafting a top QB is no longer the "casual" play. Thinking it's the casual play is now the casual play.
Having tracked this data, I've been woke to this for a while and even wrote a preseason spot for my guy Scott Barrett on Fantasy Points this past summer with this entire premise as the #1 draft goal. Here's an excerpt:
Advertisement
One more graph to drive my point home. This plots points on the y-axis and week on the x for all quarterbacks split up into the following groups:
- Green: Big 3. Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Jalen Hurts
- Gray: League starters not in Big 3. Using ESPN league weekly start percentages, any QB that was a top-12 started QB that also isn't in the Big-3. So basically the other nine likely fantasy starters
- Blue: The 13th-24th top started QBs by week
- Red: Everyone else - basically Desmond Ridder
Week 1 and 6 were relatively poor Big-3 showings but overall you can see how much more dominant the trend lines are for them vs even the other starting QBs.
Hot take - I think the public finally wakes up next year and we'll see not one, but at least TWO QBs be top-12 in overall ADP by most major sources.
Victory lap over.
- Jeffro